Forever Twilight, Patrick Sean Lee [christmas read aloud txt] 📗

Chapman Avenue ®

 

Only a few miles north of Marysville!

“Pan east again. Slowly.”

We moved back over the tops of homes, the rise of hills with dark green, water-starved overgrowth. Up and over the range of rising peaks. Farther east until the shimmering edge of the Aurora came into view. From our vantage point it was no longer a curtain, rather a wide cylindrical enclosure, separating itself from the landscape around it.

“Okay, hold it there for a second.” I watched as the lights of its makeup changed color in waves. Crimson, morphing to ultramarine; to crimson once again. Bright yellow suddenly. Back and forth again and again.

“Can you move us up? Show me the picture from higher up?”

“How higher up?”

“I don’t know. Ten thousand feet or so.”

We zoomed out.

“Lower, lower. Okay, there. Stop.

“What is it, Jerrick?”

“What you see is one of the Groupings.”

“Groupings? What does that mean? Be more specific.”

As I waited for his explanation, a massive line of black tracked across the screen from the right, totally dominating the view, dropping lower and lower and lower until the clear outline of one of the alien crafts shrunk to proportion as it descended. I’d seen many, many similar ships back when it all began; when Munster and I prowled the neighborhood of Marysville last December. Through the telescope at the farm. It entered into the center of the Aurora perimeter. Smaller, smaller. It came to rest, an ant in a forest of decimated once-green forest.

“Our benefactors call them that. The Groupings, they tell me, will enlarge as the misdirected ones they oppose widen the land until it suits their purposes.”

I didn’t have to ask what those purposes were. My planet—his planet—was being stripped mile after mile, and rebuilt to accommodate their species’ total invasion.

“Why…why do they need our planet, Jerrick? Is theirs dying? How long before it all looks like that?”

“They say no. Their home planet is quite habitable still. Why do we—did we—have our eyes on Mars, Europa, Titan? Curiosity, not the immediate need for more space to expand into. As far as how long it will take them to…Pleio-form Earth? Only a few years.”

I left the screen and shot my eyes to his impassive face.

“We have to stop them!”

“That’s what our faction wants, but they’re losing ground. We’re safe here. Down on Earth inside the dwellings they’ve provided for us, at any rate. There’s nothing you or I or any human can do to get in the spat between the two factions.”

He said this with a slight shrug of his shoulders. Defeat. Resignation.

Cowardice.

The good guys among them had restored his sight. They had lifted Mari from the dead. The two of them were stupidly satisfied, I guess. That’s what I read in his face. What did he think would happen to the rest of us, though? Whatever our eventual fate would be when the faction favoring our existence lost the fight didn’t seem to enter into his equation. Or interest. He could watch us die, and watch as his home was stripped of all life as he’d once known it.

I watched for some time, my heart sinking, as scores of tiny, tiny blobs scurried about the ship, disappearing back inside, and then returning, melting in and out of the shroud of colors, about their business of Pleioforming the valley.

“Move south and west. I want to see Marysville and the farm.”

He brought his fingers onto the screen and pushed the aerial view upward. We left the mountain range, traversed across and down until the astonishing view of Marysville crept up from the bottom of the screen. Farms giving way to scattered houses, and then their density growing. A shopping center, more houses, and then the up-crop of buildings in the city center. Without me asking, he followed the line of the highway leading south, the images changing into orange orchards and fields of lettuce and carrots and…

Then the farm appeared.

I took a deep breath.

“Pan in!”

Back Home

 

The rooftop. Its red brick chimney. The porch and the black tower, so much closer than ever I’d seen it from the ground.

My friends! All of them standing on the gravel drive encircling Mari. Peter was there in their midst. Lashawna, Jude and Sammie. Cynthia and Munster. Denise close to dear Charles. I couldn’t hear, of course, but it looked like he was speaking. He gestured with his hands, first at the tower, and then suddenly he was pointing upward.

I watched and sighed a thank you to the three alien forms standing quietly, twenty feet away. Their gross tentacles were extended, but not moving.

As Charles spoke, Lashawna suddenly threw her head into Jude’s chest, her tiny arms flying around her consoling lover’s shoulders. Standing across from them, Munster waved the pistol he must have recovered above his head. Cynthia seemed to scowl at him, and pulled his arm back down. She said something admonishingly.

“Move us closer. I want to hear what they’re saying.”

Jerrick splayed his long fingers outward. We dropped. All of the sudden I was beside Munster, looking over at Charles. The volume of his voice increased.

“You heard them, Munster. We’re not to go back.”

“They got Amelia!”

Cynthia qualified that statement. “No, she refused to return. They don’t have her. Not like you mean.

“Tell us again, Mari. She’s safe, right? And Jerrick, too?”

“Both are safe, yes. When it’s time, she’ll return. Leave them be. Leave me be. If you go back…” She turned her head toward the aliens out of view beyond the gathered group. “…you must not interfere again.”

“We wasn’t interferin’! We was just lookin’ for you and Jerrick! What’d they expect us to do?”

“Just leave well enough alone. If they allow, Jerrick and I will visit in the future. Perhaps.” Her voice was, what? SO much more mature than when she’d walked among us. It wasn’t the voice, though, of a friend. There was a distant, hard edge to it. After speaking, she walked between the bodies, over toward the out-of-sight tower. Bodies turned. Eyes opened wide. Denise’s mouth dropped open.

What? What was going on with Mari and that cursed ‘gift’?

“Move the view to Mari.”

Jerrick glanced down at me, but this time he didn’t follow my request.

“Okay then, I’m finished here. I want to go back.”

He didn’t answer, just stood next to me at the screen for a few seconds.

“But you haven’t seen the rest of the ship; met some of the others the Pleia rescued.”

As the scene back at the farm continued on, a maelstrom of overlapping voices and movement, I answered Jerrick.

“I swear, Jerrick, if you don’t get me back down to the farm this minute, I’ll go back to that door. I’ll find it, and by all that’s holy, I swear I’ll jump.”

The creature behind us rustled. I shot my head around. Her head grazed the ceiling, the tentacles extended, but flattened against it. I could see eyes. Quite open, staring down at me. Bright red, glowing embers.

She. It was so hard to grasp that.

There was a moment of absolute quiet, and then she exited the room backward. The last thing I saw of her was her snakey head and fiery red eyes moving quickly through the collapsing doorway.

Jerrick sighed. “Suit yourself.” He stepped around me and made his way to the line that was the door. I glanced one more time at the screen hanging on the wall. It had gone black again. I turned and followed him.

He led me back to the spot where I’d awoken. I guess that’s where we went. The interior of this ship was like a dense cloud. Without Jerrick leading the way, I probably would have bumped into one of its sides. Or right through it into space. So long Amelia.

Still, at least now I knew. My friends back on Earth probably had no idea, though. We were all doomed, that is if the friendly-to-us group lost the argument with the rest of the invaders. The words Jerrick had spoken back in their play room, or whatever it was; the images north and east of Marysville kept hitting me. How long would it really take until the monsters had scoured every inch of land, us along with it? Was it in some of their strange minds to ferry all of us up to this nightmare place—forever changed, or brainwashed—to become their pets?

Not if I could help it. I had no idea how I’d stop them, but I would. We would. Jerrick and Mari and the rest of these zoo-pieces could stay up here…or down there on the avocado farm if they wanted. So sad. I suppose they had no voice in the matter. Mari especially. She’d asked for none of this. But Jerrick—he had.

I’ll do anything to see again.

How could I tell Lashawna? Well, first I had to get back to her.

 

I was awake this time.

You see movies in which the crew of a re-entry vehicle begins the long, bone-jarring descent into the Earth’s atmosphere. A terrific vibration—ah Hollywood, you were so creative—when the heat shield begins to split the thickening layers of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. You’re sitting right there in the cabin facing the control panel, all blinking with lights. You’re the Commander trying to focus, but you have doubts about this mission for some reason. The heat outside is tremendous, a hurricane-look of glowing red and pink as you roar downward, braking from 20,000 miles per hour.

We’re safe. We’re safe. The computers are handling everything.

Of course you make it out of the theater later, a little sweaty, but otherwise fine. The spaceship made it home, but it was touch and go there for a few long minutes.

My journey back was altogether different.

First off, I wasn’t stuffed inside a spacesuit. I was wearing the same shorts and top I’d set off from the farm in…this morning? Yesterday? Last week? No, it had to have been only hours ago. I’d just seen them, only minutes ago, all of them back at the farm, standing outside firing questions at Mari. Right? Yes, that had to be. They’d only arrived themselves a short time earlier.

I’d sat down at Jerrick’s command, and then immediately there was the sensation of falling. A little. Gravity latching onto me I knew. Had I been weightless ten minutes earlier? No. But I definitely felt acceleration for an instant. No G-force, though. No deceleration when we ripped through the atmosphere. We had to have slowed. How could any of that be? Maybe later Charles could explain it.

It took only seconds. Commander Whatever-His-Name-Was in the movie had to endure a sense of stuffed terror for several minutes. Strange how these creatures orbiting the Earth had somehow sidestepped Newton’s Laws.

I don’t remember “landing”. I blinked, and we were there, the space in front of Jerrick and me opening with that shimmer. The bright sunlight bursting in. The familiar gravel drive. The house and the Tower thirty feet away. My family in a state of shock ten feet away.

Sammie screamed with childish joy the moment I stepped forward. A general and very visible feeling of relief washed over all of them, except Mari. I could see her cold, dark eyes looking past me at Jerrick. Was she angry that he hadn’t kept me up there longer, or…? I wondered what message was being conveyed? I leapt out, landing